1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a method and an apparatus for sending or shipping electrically stored communications or letter contents and/or data on flat information carriers, such as chip cards, that require prepaid postage.
Electronically stored and optionally additionally encoded letter contents or communications which are, for instance, output to a chip card by a personal computer, through a read-write device connected thereto, and are stored in memory in the chip card, may be shipped in the conventional manner in an envelope. The sending of chip cards can be done to transmit information or for the one-time delivery of the chip card to persons in order to make the cards available to them. Depending on the way that mass mailings are to be sent and shipped and on the address, such mailings require the application of different postage values, which would conventionally have to be entered into a postage meter machine by operators.